Do you happen to have a few hundred million pounds ready? Do you want to buy a population of 1.3 million people? If so, contact the "Eesti Geenikeskus", the Estonian Genome Foundation. It is looking for investors to fund what would become the world's biggest database of medical and genetic data, a database that will essentially comprise everything that can be found out about the Estonian people. The whole people. To find suitable investors, the foundation publicises its project (www.genomics.ee) on the web , displaying a persuasiveness that would put double-glazing companies to shame.
Estonian people, in case you didn't know, are just perfect. Quite steady, as they have been settling in their present location for at least 5,000 years, but not too isolated from the rest of the world. Their family trees can normally be traced back into the 17th century. More than a third of the people old enough to take a degree have done so, and the life expectancy is 70 years.
Most importantly, they have willingly accepted the deal. Opinion polls suggest that more than 90% of the 1.445 million Estonians are ready to part with 50ml of their blood and a detailed account of their medical history. A law regulating the details of the procedure is expected to pass parliament without problems.
What seems to have won over the Estonian politicians was the hope of becoming world leaders in something for the first time. The only other project on a comparable scale started in Iceland last year, following a protracted public debate that ended with the approval by parliament in December 1998.
However, the Icelandic gene pool is much smaller and more homogeneous than the Estonian one. Icelanders descend from a small number of settlers and have remained isolated for centuries. While there are now 275,000 today, there have been fewer than 50,000 until very recently.
What the Icelandic company deCODE is beginning to do, and what the Estonians are hoping to do on a bigger scale and with more generalisable results, is to relate those very small parts of our genes that make us different from each other to the observable effects that our genes have in terms of diseases, appearance and so on.
Most of the building blocks of our DNA will be found to be identical in all (or a vast majority of) human beings. But there are a few hundred thousand positions in the genome where differences are common. The sequencing of the human genome, which is now nearing completion, will allow scientists to pin down such variable spots, which can then be used as markers to describe the genetic identity of each person in a process called genotyping.
Each living person has a large number of genetic traits, such as eye colour, body shape and inherited abilities or disabilities, which cannot be easily related to the genetic markers. So far, only relatively rare medical conditions have been successfully matched with genetic markers.
If a number of people have both a rare disease and a rare genetic marker, this is unlikely to be a coincidence. In order to assign the more common traits, such as blue eyes, diabetes or heart disease, to their genetic origins, one needs a large number of people - a million will do nicely.
In such a big sample, the traits will also be represented in large numbers, so you will, for instance, have half a million people with blue eyes in the database. Looking at the hundreds of thousands of variable genetic markers of those half-million people, one might find a combination of a few markers that is present in all of them but not normally in those people with other eye colours. While such a finding could be a coincidence in half a dozen blue-eyed people, it would be a significant scientific result if confirmed in half-a-million people.
So far, the scientific arguments in favour of such a study are perfectly reasonable. If we were talking about mice or guinea pigs, there would be no reason not to carry it out. The trouble is, we are talking about human beings whose lives maybe affected by genetic information becoming public. In contrast to Icelanders, who argued about their genome project for a year, Estonians appear to be blissfully unaware of the side-effects that the combination of medical and genetic information could have.
Under the subheading "risks", the Estonian Genome Foundation lists nine scenarios in which their project could run into problems or be beaten by competitors, but doesn't waste a single thought on the possibility that the 1.3m subjects of their research could suffer as a consequence of the project.
While a collection of genetic, genealogical or medical data would be relatively harmless, the connections between the three contain ethical timebombs of different kinds. The database may contain evidence proving that tens of thousands of people are not related to the man they consider to be their father. Anybody hacking into the data should find a rich supply of people to blackmail. Similarly, other information could be of sufficient value to some to encourage illegal access and use of the data. Simply replacing the subjects' names with codes and making a law to say that the misuse of genetic data is forbidden will not be sufficient to protect the privacy of the research subjects.
While the ethical dilemmas surrounding genetic screening have been debated at length in Britain and other European countries, Estonians don't seem to be aware of these problems. The Weekly Crier, a web news service from the Baltic countries, cites a medical professor, Tiina Tasmuth, one of the few critics of the project as saying: "People here don't ask why, as they do in the west." If they did, the honest answer would probably be most likely to sound like "money". After all, the investors who will eventually fund the project will want something in return, such as patents on new genetic tests, the uses and misuses of which we can't even imagine today.
• Michael Gross is a science writer based at the Oxford Centre for Molecular Sciences. New editions of his books Life On The Edge and Travels To The Nanoworld are coming out in paperback at Perseus Books in January.
